Digital news media power up with custom-cloud solutions

Product ReleaseJanuary 10, 2019

News-media organizations are using Eidosmedia’s public-private cloud solutions to achieve new power and flexibility in their operations.

“In the last year, 100% of our new customers in the news-media sector have opted for some form of cloud hosting,” said Eidosmedia CMO, Massimo Barsotti. “Some are pure cloud solutions, others use a combination of cloud-hosted components and on-premise infrastructure. In fact, we’re able to combine a range of hosting options to create hybrid solutions that are optimized for the geographical and logistical situations of each client.”

Over the last decade there has been a tendency for news-media companies to outsource a growing portion of the responsibility for the maintenance and day-to-day management of their editorial infrastructure. "We have long-standing customers whose installations are monitored and managed remotely round the clock by engineers at our headquarters,” said Massimo. “Their IT staff activities are limited to routine hardware maintenance. We take care of the rest.”

Cloud deployment takes this approach one step further by hosting the entire installation in a remote facility under the supervision of Eidosmedia support engineers. In this case, Eidosmedia undertakes to deliver the functionality of the platform ‘as a service’ (PaaS). The customer is relieved of all technical responsibility for the solution from its installation to its monitoring, maintenance and periodic upgrade.

If – as is increasingly the case – the customer uses Eidosmedia’s Swing mobile interface to access the workflow, no installation of any kind is needed on the customer’s premises. Users access the platform across a network connection using a web browser or mobile app. This ‘zero footprint’ approach represents a significant simplification and cost saving, especially for organizations with hundreds or thousands of users.

What are the benefits of using a cloud-hosted platform for news-media operations?

“Eliminating the need to purchase, install and maintain the platform hardware and infrastructure already represents a big time and cost saving,” said Giovanni Camarda, Eidosmedia System Technology & Cloud Strategy Advisor. “At the same time, the customer is guaranteed an up-to-date, optimized platform because we are able to regularly update and enhance the software in accordance with a upgrade schedule agreed with the customer.”

“There’s also a big advantage for online news providers with large peak audiences,” added Giovanni. “ In a conventional solution, providing extra capacity to cope with peaks in visitor traffic means investing in hardware - hardware that goes unused a lot of the time. A cloud deployment, on the other hand, can scale up web-server capacity and resources dynamically in real time, shedding it when the traffic peak has passed.“

“Business continuity is guaranteed by the advanced backup and disaster-recovery mechanisms available in cloud deployments,” said Giovanni. “In fact, our customers’ data is safer in the cloud than it could ever be in a local installation.”

Eidosmedia offers cloud solutions with major providers such as Amazon Web Services (Eidosmedia is an AWS Advanced Partner) and Google Cloud Platform. In addition to these ‘hyper-scaler’ offerings, Eidosmedia also manages a private cloud, based in Frankfurt, Germany, providing a platform for the deployments of many of its news-media and corporate customers in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

“Some of these solutions are hybrid solutions,” said Giovanni. “For example, one customer uses our private cloud for the main editorial components and a hyper-scaler public cloud for the delivery of digital content to take advantage of its virtually unlimited capacity. This represents an optimized solution in terms of cost-effectiveness.”

“Cloud deployment is now one of the first things we take into account when planning the future development of our products,” said Massimo Barsotti. “We are adopting a new framework which, among other benefits, will make the cloud deployment of our software even more efficient and scalable.”